We've moved! Come visit our new blog:

Blog Archive

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Playing around with Google's AJAX APIs

By Ben Lisbakken, Developer Programs Engineer

For me, documentation isn't always enough to learn about APIs; I need examples that I can play with. That's why I started a fun project recently--a tool for teaching developers how to use Google's JavaScript APIs: the AJAX API Playground. I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud to announce that we are launching the AJAX API Playground as the official way that Google will show JavaScript samples!

The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can edit and run to help you explore what Google's APIs have to offer. There are also save and export features. The save feature allows you to hold onto an edited sample so you can continue working on it later, while export lets you modify a sample and publish the code to a permanent url.

Congratulations for shipping it Ben, this will be useful for many APIs and projects.Very much in the same spirit as Paul Buchheit's post http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html

I really like this to learn to code. One thing I would love to see Google do is a website/application where geared toward children to learn HTML/API/coding etc. I think in this day and age, children should be learning webcode along with Grammar, Math and History